I am not scared of his next cramp

My husband's legs cramp every night. I'm scared of what I was doing while we waited for it. I know how that reads. The cramp is the thing you are supposed to be frightened of, and I have lain awake through five of them in one night, and I know exactly what his scream at 2am sounds like through a wall.

Robert has not failed a circulation test in five years. And his legs have got worse through every one of them. That is the part nobody prepares you for. I was braced for an event. I had the number for the out-of-hours doctor in my phone and a tub of magnesium by the bed and a plan for the night his legs finally gave out.

I was ready for the thing that arrives. Nobody told me about the thing that does not arrive. The thing that just takes a little more every month while both of you stand there telling each other the socks and the magnesium are keeping it steady.

And I helped it. Not on purpose. I would have told you I was doing everything right. But I have gone back over the last five years properly now and I can tell you the exact things I did that made it easier for his legs to stop, and most of them looked like kindness at the time.

Here are the things I did. He started struggling with the stairs about two years in. So I moved what he needed downstairs. His book, his charger, a blanket on the good chair. It took me a Saturday afternoon and I was quite pleased with myself.

He stopped going up the stairs. Then he stopped going up them at all. He got slow getting out of the car in parking lots. So I started dropping him at the door and going to park. Every time. It became a thing we did without discussing it.

He stopped walking across parking lots. He began saying no to things on Fridays because the week had finished his legs. So I got good at cancelling. I would ring people myself so he did not have to. I was proud of that one, genuinely. I thought I was protecting him from the explaining.

Here is the bit I actually cannot get past

He stopped being invited. And the appointments. I answered for him. Not once, not by accident, systematically, for two years. The doctor would say how have things been and there would be a pause of about a second and I would fill it, because I did not like the pause, and because I thought I was helping him not have to summon it up.

I have no idea what my husband would have said in those pauses. Two years of them. I will never know. Every one of those was kindness. Every one of them was me making it slightly easier to do less, and slightly easier to say nothing.

I am not sitting here telling you I gave my husband bad circulation. I did not. His arteries narrowed with age and none of this is my fault. But I made the shrinking comfortable. And a thing that is comfortable does not get fought. Our daughter rang me in March. Not about anything. She was asking what we were doing for the grandson's birthday.

Halfway through she said, so is he still not getting out at all? I said what do you mean. She said, Dad told me he hasn't been further than the letterbox since January. It was the ninth of March. We live in the same house. I make him coffee every morning. I sleep one room away from him.

And I found out from our daughter, on the phone, about a birthday. The letterbox is as far as he needed to go. I had built it that way. Everything downstairs. The car at the door. The phone calls made for him. I had spent five years quietly removing every reason he had to walk further than the letterbox, and then I was surprised when he didn't.

I did not say anything to him that night. I made dinner and we watched something and I sat there doing the arithmetic on nine weeks. Because I already knew what I would have said. I would have said, why didn't you tell me. And he would have had to explain it. Again. To the person who is supposed to already know.

I had been in the room for two years

So I stopped doing one thing. At his April appointment the doctor asked how things had been, and the pause came, and I sat in it. It was the longest four seconds of my adult life.

And then my husband answered, and he said things I had never heard him say. About his calves at 2am. About how far he gets now before he has to stop and pretend to check his phone. About the grandson's match he had not been to in over a year.

I had not been listening to him. I had been talking over the gap where he was. That night I started reading. Not articles. I had read the articles. Everybody reads the articles in the first month and then stops, because they all say the same four things and none of them are any use to a woman standing in a kitchen at midnight.

I mean papers. The proper ones, with the abstracts and the tables I had no business fully understanding. I was reading about the lining of an artery at one in the morning like a woman looking for a loophole in a contract. And what I found was not what I expected.

The lining is the coating on the inside of an artery. Everybody knows that part. Poor circulation lets it stop making the signal that opens the vessel, and that is why the blood cannot get through.

What nobody had ever told me is that the body keeps making that signal. Constantly. There is a whole population of cells lining the vessel wall whose entire job is making the one chemical that tells it to open. They have been working inside my husband since the day his circulation started to go and they will keep working until he dies.

I had assumed it was like a rusted pipe. Rust happens, rust stays, you manage what is left. It is not a rusted pipe. It is a switch waiting to be flipped. And the moment I understood that, one question arrived and would not leave.

What turns them back on. The answer is three things. Two weeks of reading to be sure of it, about forty seconds to understand once I had it.

Deep Heat pushes the ache back a few hours

Capsaicin, the compound in cayenne pepper, is the one thing that flips the TRPV1 switch on the vessel wall, and it takes thirty thousand fresh peppers to make a single serving of it.

Nitric oxide is what the switch releases, the signal that tells the vessel to let go and open, and it runs short because after 40 the wall makes roughly 10 percent less of it every decade. Cold-processed beetroot is what keeps that signal coming through the night, when the pressure drops around 2am and there is otherwise not enough flow left to reach his calves.

Switch, signal, hold. There is a word for where the three of them act. Endothelial. It does not mean healthy or good for the heart in general. It means acting on the lining of the vessel wall, the one place this can be fixed. So I got Robert's pile off the kitchen counter and went down it line by line.

The compression socks squeeze the blood up from the outside. Prescribed, dutiful, he has never gone a day without them and he never will. Magnesium loosens the muscle. Two hundred dollars of physio every six weeks, which is a bill I never expected to be paying to have a man of 62 taught to stretch before bed.

Quinine, because somebody said quinine, the one that set his heart racing. And pentoxifylline, offered twice, expensive but it works, both times long after it was too late to matter. Six things. Four different doctors across two years. Not one of them had spoken to another one.

And not a single one of them reached the inside of the wall. Everything on that counter works on the outside. Nothing on it reaches the inside. And I recognised it, sitting there, because I had done exactly the same thing. Five years of moving the house around his legs and not one hour spent asking what was happening inside them.

Two things stopped me before I did anything about it. The first was that Robert's readings were never quite bad enough. They are on every chart his doctors have. Middle of the range, nothing flagged, and in five years not one person in a room with us has said a word about them.